All our people…

Like so many others with southern roots, The Legal Genealogist has a family history that is intimately bound up with that “peculiar institution” — slavery.

It’s not something I expected to have to deal with when I first began looking at the past through a genealogical lens.

On my father’s side, I am first generation American. My father and his parents were all born in Germany and didn’t emigrate to the United States until 1925. No issue of slavery on that side.

On my mother’s side, I had seen my mother’s careful entries of her parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents in my older sister’s baby book. Those entries suggested that our most recent immigrants would have been born in Ireland and Wales and would have come to America at a time that I figured would be after the Civil War.

It turns out, of course, that Ireland and Wales must be small towns in Mississippi, since that in fact is where those ancestors were born — and the family in all its varied lines has been in America since the 1600s, with only a few latecomers in the 1700s.

And every last one of them — until my generation — lived in the south.

With that history, it wasn’t at all surprising to find enslavers lurking in the branches of my family tree. Nor is it truly surprising to find that I am now closing in on what I believe may turn out to be a fifth great grandfather who was himself a free man of color.

This is my history.

This is our history.

Black history is the history of all our people.

So we all need to know more — more about the history, and particularly more about how to find and integrate records of African-Americans into our genealogical research plans.

And today — the first of February 2020 and the first day of Black History Month — the Center for Family History of the International African American Museum in partnership with FamilySearch launches its first major collaboration in a way that will help every one of us.

Each day during February, FamilySearch will launch or feature a searchable collection especially helpful for African-American genealogical research. And the IAAM Center for Family History will then teach us how best to use the records in a series of blog posts focusing on those featured collections.

The Center explains: “In each post, we’ll introduce that day’s featured collection, show you what’s in the collection and suggest next steps if you find an ancestor there. Then, we’ll take a deep dive into researching from a specific example document from that collection.”1

We can get more background on what FamilySearch is doing in the FamilySearch blog post, “All about Black History Month.”2 Or we can get more background on what the IAAM Center for Family History is doing on its page for Black History Month — and that’s where we can all follow along with the collections and their explanations. so we all want to bookmark that page and come back to it every day during Black History Month.

Or we can just dive in to any one of the seven collections that are already featured and highlighted by the Center:

The post begins by giving us an overview of the collection itself and what’s in it. It explains what value a researcher might get from researching in the collection. And then it gives a very specific example — researching George Jones, born 23 April 1911 in Harrison County, who applied in November 1968 for a delayed birth certificate.

The blog post explains the kinds of information recorded in the document, and the kinds of evidence that Jones had to produce to support his application.

It then goes on to talk about the different ways that information might be used in family history: to find more in places like marriage records, World War II draft registrations, census records, and even on Find a Grave. It’s like a mini-lesson on following up on the clues from that delayed birth record.

And if that wasn’t enough, the post then goes on to suggest related resources and FamilySearch Wiki resources for African American genealogy.

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2 Comments

Doug Bell on February 1, 2020 at 11:30 am

The site mentions the 1866 Alabama census. It consists of 3 separate schedules. Two are white and one is African American. There are also voting rolls from around 1867 for Alabama and many other former confederate states. I have used Georgia and Texas. Some records that will get overlooked. Social Security Applications SS-5 Union soldiers service records & pensions for African Americans African Americans sometimes got state Confederate pensions especially in Tenn. Mortality census schedules list free and slave deaths. WW1&2 draft and military records. Property insurance records for plantations with an insurance policy on their enslaved property.

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